A Systematic Mapping Study on Privacy by Design in Software Engineering

Protecting personal data in current software systems is a complex issue that requires legal regulations and constraints to manage personal data as well as a methodological support to develop software systems that would safeguard data privacy of their respective users. Privacy by Design (PbD) approach has been proposed to address this issue and has been applied to systems development in a variety of application domains. The aim of this work is to determine the presence of PbD and its extent in software development efforts. A systematic mapping study was conducted in order to identify relevant literature that collects PbD principles and goals in software development as well as methods and/or practices that support privacy aware software development. 53 selected papers address PbD mostly from a theoretical perspective with proposals validation based primarily on experiences or examples. The findings suggest that there is a need to develop privacy-aware methods to be integrated at all stages of software development life cycle and validate them in industrial settings.